Duncan,
our 26-year-old Wedge-tailed eagle, recently came out of retirement to wow audiences at WBS’s educational bird shows at
Stone Zoo near Boston, MA.
Meet Duncan, WBS's Wedge-tailed Eagle
The
last time this bird flew in our education programs was in 1994. This summer she
is back and flying at our zoo program at Stone Zoo in Boston, MA, and doing quite well. At first I was unsure of how this would go,
but I was very excited to have this opportunity to, basically, retrain this
bird.
Training
birds, and any animal I would assume, is very challenging. The first thing that
we have to figure out is the “working weight”
of the bird. The working weight is the weight we keep them at during their
flying season (6 months of flying 6 months off), and this is a weight at which
they’re food motivated (in other words, a weight at which they want food, but they’re not starving). The
working weight is heavier than they would be naturally in the wild, but lighter
than they would be if they were offered as much food as they wanted without
working for it. In order to find that magic number it takes observation. Too
light and your bird gets aggressive, too heavy and your bird won’t fly. Once
you find this magic number you then have to do a lot of practicing and getting
the bird back in shape because just like us, birds also get out of shape. We
usually take about a month and a half to two months to get all the birds back
in shape.
Photo courtesy of Alex Navarro, Educational Specialist, Stone Zoo
Once
that training period has gone by its then time for shows to start. This is when you learn even more about
your bird. You have to get them used to seeing people in the theater, because during
show practice time you practice in an empty
theater. If the bird is new to flying for an audience you have to slowly build
up from just a few people to more and larger
crowds. You quickly learn all the strange things that individual birds may not
like. I’ve worked with birds that
don’t like the strangest things, like big
necklaces or strollers, or crutches. A very few don’t like sunglasses, perhaps because they can see themselves
in them—or that’s what we think at least.
Photo
courtesy of Alex Navarro, Educational Specialist, Stone Zoo
After
learning the quirks of individual birds and doing our best to keep that object
away from them, you then have to regularly deal with uncontrollable factors,
like wind. Very windy conditions
may sometimes blow a free flying bird off course, but with the right flight
muscle conditioning (in other words, lots of practice), our birds fly very well
when the wind is blowing.
Photo
courtesy of Alex Navarro, Educational Specialist, Stone Zoo
After
taking all these factors into consideration, and even
if you do everything right, sometimes the unexpected still happens--they are
live animals after all. Most
times, though, things work out perfectly, and you get
what I would imagine to be a “proud parent” moment the first time your bird
does the exact behavior you’ve been training. Then, when the behavior you’re asking of your bird becomes consistent, that
is one of the best feelings a trainer can have.
Photo
courtesy of Alex Navarro, Educational Specialist, Stone Zoo
All
of this is what my staff and I have dealt with while getting Duncan back into
the swing of things. And finally,
after tons of practice and hard work, she is doing very well and flying for all
our audiences at Stone Zoo. We are all very proud of this
magnificent bird.
Submitted
by Jaimie Sansoucie, World Bird Sanctuary Naturalist/Trainer
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